After installation, PC-BSD® will reboot and you will be prompted to configure your system and to login to a desktop.

The graphical PC-BSD® bootloader menu, is shown in Figure 4.1a.

Figure 4.1a: PC-BSD® Graphical Boot Menu

This menu is provided by GRUB and will show the installed operating systems and any previously created boot environments. If you are familiar with editing GRUB, you can press e to access the GRUB editor or c to access the GRUB command line.

NOTE: if you are dual booting and your other operating system was not automatically added to GRUB by the installer, see Dual Booting.

Unless you press a key, this screen will pause for a few seconds then continue to boot PC-BSD®. If you wish to select a different operating system or specify how PC-BSD® boots, press a key to pause this screen. If multiple operating systems are available and you want to boot into PC-BSD®, make sure it is highlighted and press enter. This will load the boot options screen shown in Figure 4.1b.

Figure 4.1b: PC-BSD® Graphical Boot Menu Options

The following boot options are available:

Normal Bootup: continues to boot PC-BSD®.

Single User Mode: advanced users can select this option to fix critical system failures.

Verbose Mode: select this option if you would like to see more detailed messages during the boot process. This can be useful if you are troubleshooting a piece of hardware.

Run the Display Wizard: if you are unable to access the GUI due to a display setting, enable this option to boot into the display settings wizard.

Use the arrow keys to select an option then press enter to boot using that option.

Once the first boot is complete, the installer will attempt to set the optimal display settings. A pop-up menu will ask if you would like to accept these settings. Simply click "Yes" to continue. PC-BSD® will now play a short video. You can press Esc to skip the video and move on to the Language screen of the post-installation process.

If Your Display is Not Automatically Detected

If you instead select "No" in the "Confirm Resolution" screen, or if for some reason the installer is unable to find the optimal display settings, you will instead see the "Display Settings" screen shown in Figure 4.1c:

Figure 4.1c: Display Settings Wizard

The settings in this screen are described in more detail in Display. If you wish to return to this display wizard at a later time, go to Control Panel ➜ Display.

If you change any display settings, click the "Apply" button for the settings to be tested. If anything goes wrong during testing, you will be taken back to the "Display Settings" screen so that you can try another setting. Once you are happy with the tested setting, click the "Yes" button to save the setting and to proceed.

Fast Boot

PC-BSD® uses a "fast boot" script to decrease the amount of time that it takes the system to boot to the login screen. When this script is enabled, which is the default, services are started in the background and the boot process does not wait for confirmation from each service as it starts. This is referred to as delayed mode.

The fast boot script is controlled by these lines in /etc/rc.conf.pcbsd:

The logfile /var/log/rc_delay.log shows the startup messages for the services which were started in delayed mode. If this log indicates that a delayed mode service is not starting correctly, become the superuser, remove the path to that service in the fastboot_earlyrc line of /etc/rc.conf, and reboot to see if that fixes the problem.

If a faster boot time is not important to you and you prefer to watch each service as it starts at boot time, you can disable fast boot by changing the "YES" to a "NO" in the fastboot_enable line of /etc/rc.conf.